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As a former hiring manager, I am a little puzzled what the deal is for employers. New grad positions are usually the easiest to fill, by far - much easier than

As a former hiring manager, I am a little puzzled what the deal is for employers. New grad positions are usually the easiest to fill, by far - much easier than any software engineering position where you’re hiring for some former experience. Also, new grads are almost always put on a team with more experienced engineers - one new grad at a time. This is so they get mentorship, onboarding and taking team dynamics into account. So I see little to no point in bringing a cohesive group of new grads into a company, who want to negotiate a higher compensation to come in, as a group. Instead: just hire individual new grads, have them start together, they are broken up into teams but give them space to socialise with each other. It’s how new grad programs work at most tech companies. I get that this setup sounds amazing for new grads. Come with a team you already know! Earn more money! But I just don’t see the sell working for most companies. Paying a premium to hire a team of engineers with experience absolutely makes sense, assuming that team keeps working as the same unit. This is why acqui-hires often negotiate a higher price than hiring each member would be. Note that during acqui-hires, companies interview each team member and usually refuse to take on people who they decide don’t meet their hiring bar. A team of new grads, who likely wouldn’t work on the same team after hiring? Trusting interviewing with a third party company which probably has a different standard than my company? Paying more for this group than if I individually hired new grads? I cannot see any appeal, putting my hiring manager hat on. What am I missing?

mapsdkhsd 4y ago
Indeed, that is one of the primary concerns on the employer side we've heard. It is easier to hire new grads for sure. Our solution to that is to offer highly desirable engineers. Our founding group is a set of high school friends, currently all juniors at Caltech, CMU, and MIT. In our first batch, we have numerous groups with high Putnam scores, high ranking competitive programmers, and 2+ FAANG internships. There will likely be a sense of FOMO for companies in order to recruit these groups, as they'd be losing out on multiple highly regarded talents. Eventually, we would scale down the quality factor as this method of hiring becomes less peculiar. We've already had a number of companies commit, so I suppose it's working. Plus, these students don't necessarily need to work together in the same department. Students have expressed a tremendous want towards just being in a new city with the same subset of friends. There's also some unfounded benefits we will be analyzing and testing in our first few batches. We theorize that this could greatly influence the retention and burnout rates at companies, which is a big issue in tech. As for trusting a third-party with interviews. We agree that this is one of the biggest leaps companies will have to make, but we think multiple rounds of leet-code style interviews aren't correlated with success anyway. And, applicants have to do basically the same problem sets over at each interview and company. We also let companies add supplemental questions to roles, like the college admissions process, so we hope that's enough to bridge the gap for now. I agree that is might be even more experimental, but I think it's necessary in the long run, for other reasons too.
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  The idea of a company being more cohesive seems appealing from the employer side as well. I don't remember if I've seen studies to back this up, but I'd suspect that retention is much higher when your employees have formed meaningful relationships within the company.
- gregdoesit 4y ago
  It’s true that if you can say “you can hire from {top N colleges like MIT}” then this would be attractive. Trouble is, this won’t scale beyond the top 10: the ones which get far more recruiter reachouts than students. The other thing that could be a sell is retention. Retaining new grads beyond a year or two is notoriously difficult. If you’d have data or proof that this approach significantly increases retention and its because of the group setting, that could make the premium laid worthwhile. You still need to convince companies to trust your assessment method: not a problem while you only have new grads from the very top schools, but would be a problem if you open up to all colleges.
  - mapsdkhsd 4y ago
    Thanks for your input! I agree with all your points. Right now, we're just doing things that don't scale and hoping it works out. A year after the first two batches graduate, hopefully we have enough data points to workout tangible benefits.
    - gregdoesit 4y ago
      If you take away “universities where everyone wants to hire from but very few can”, I am personally dubious of what else there is left. Also you might want to look to understand what went wrong at Triplebyte which wanted to provide a one interview-only experience for experienced candidates but it never worked. Companies still did their interviews. The company also had to pivot their business model from this and explained in detail why they did it [1] Triplebyte was targeting a very valuable and hard-to-hire group of experienced engineers. You are targeting the easiest to hire group. Consider what will make you succeed as a business where Triplebyte could not, even though they solved for a much bigger pain point for hiring managers. [1] https://triplebyte.com/blog/rethinking-triplebyte https://triplebyte.com/blog/rethinking-triplebyte
dmitriid_y 4y ago
From experience, this is not dissimilar to the internship-to-hire programs large firms like Qualcomm have used. At anywhere even 10% of that company's size, any individual can easily feel lost in a tidal wave -- triply so if your firm is facing any significant mountain of work prohibiting a good onboarding. Some employers may think this is even advantageous for them, but it can burnout the new hires fast. The difference with this is the new cohort would have better cohesion from the get-go and might stand a greater chance of dealing with cultural fusion, imposter syndrome, "am I paid appropriately" syndrome, "why shouldn't I advocate a union" syndrome, etc
- geraldwhen 4y ago
  Quite the opposite. Cohesion likely means non-diverse. HR would prefer that each team member be as different as possible in terms of age, sex, race, etc. The less cohesive the team, the better my team looks to the HR gods that send me threatening meeting invites.
rgbrgb 4y ago
They might be a good team. A team of undergrads built Facebook. Agree it could be a hard sell internally but if they had a track record of building great apps, I could see hiring them to build another one. That said, if a team is that strong they should probably start their own company.
- watwut 4y ago
  > but if they had a track record of building great apps In that case, we should not primary refer to them as to "new-grads". The primary thing about them is that they already successfully build multiple apps. They should be referred to as "existing team".
- onion2k 4y ago
  They might be a good team. A team of undergrads built Facebook. On the other hand, they might be a terrible team. A team of undergrads built Facebook.
jokethrowaway 4y ago
There are new grads who are already at senior level and have been working for several years. They're definitely a minority but they exist and if this company can select groups of new grads that ship. I remember very well I was working with a team of great engineers when I was in uni and we all sadly split up to pursue different careers. That said, focusing on new grads sounds limiting, if I was BYOT I'd allow any groups of developers to participate. There is plenty of freelancers groups who may find it attractive to work together for a single client. The main reason I don't like working inside companies is that I'm subject to whatever BS management think will make us more productive. In hindsight, in my 15 years of professional experience, that never works. A group of motivated seniors contributors will always find a way to self organise which is more efficient than whatever rituals are imposed.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gms7777 4y ago
Possibly retention? A group of friends coming into something together might stick around longer than a typical new grad. On the other hand, they might all bounce as a group if they're unhappy.
- lkxijlewlf 4y ago
  Nah, turnover would be higher. 6 Months in they're screaming at each other because they can't decide on spaces or tabs.
datavirtue 4y ago
The obvious hyper-brogrammer generator. Sounds like the opposite of what everyone wants.

mapsdkhsd 4y ago

Indeed, that is one of the primary concerns on the employer side we've heard. It is easier to hire new grads for sure. Our solution to that is to offer highly desirable engineers. Our founding group is a set of high school friends, currently all juniors at Caltech, CMU, and MIT. In our first batch, we have numerous groups with high Putnam scores, high ranking competitive programmers, and 2+ FAANG internships. There will likely be a sense of FOMO for companies in order to recruit these groups, as they'd be losing out on multiple highly regarded talents. Eventually, we would scale down the quality factor as this method of hiring becomes less peculiar. We've already had a number of companies commit, so I suppose it's working. Plus, these students don't necessarily need to work together in the same department. Students have expressed a tremendous want towards just being in a new city with the same subset of friends. There's also some unfounded benefits we will be analyzing and testing in our first few batches. We theorize that this could greatly influence the retention and burnout rates at companies, which is a big issue in tech. As for trusting a third-party with interviews. We agree that this is one of the biggest leaps companies will have to make, but we think multiple rounds of leet-code style interviews aren't correlated with success anyway. And, applicants have to do basically the same problem sets over at each interview and company. We also let companies add supplemental questions to roles, like the college admissions process, so we hope that's enough to bridge the gap for now. I agree that is might be even more experimental, but I think it's necessary in the long run, for other reasons too.

pcthrowaway 4y ago
The idea of a company being more cohesive seems appealing from the employer side as well. I don't remember if I've seen studies to back this up, but I'd suspect that retention is much higher when your employees have formed meaningful relationships within the company.
gregdoesit 4y ago
It’s true that if you can say “you can hire from {top N colleges like MIT}” then this would be attractive. Trouble is, this won’t scale beyond the top 10: the ones which get far more recruiter reachouts than students. The other thing that could be a sell is retention. Retaining new grads beyond a year or two is notoriously difficult. If you’d have data or proof that this approach significantly increases retention and its because of the group setting, that could make the premium laid worthwhile. You still need to convince companies to trust your assessment method: not a problem while you only have new grads from the very top schools, but would be a problem if you open up to all colleges.
- mapsdkhsd 4y ago
  Thanks for your input! I agree with all your points. Right now, we're just doing things that don't scale and hoping it works out. A year after the first two batches graduate, hopefully we have enough data points to workout tangible benefits.
  - gregdoesit 4y ago
    If you take away “universities where everyone wants to hire from but very few can”, I am personally dubious of what else there is left. Also you might want to look to understand what went wrong at Triplebyte which wanted to provide a one interview-only experience for experienced candidates but it never worked. Companies still did their interviews. The company also had to pivot their business model from this and explained in detail why they did it [1] Triplebyte was targeting a very valuable and hard-to-hire group of experienced engineers. You are targeting the easiest to hire group. Consider what will make you succeed as a business where Triplebyte could not, even though they solved for a much bigger pain point for hiring managers. [1] https://triplebyte.com/blog/rethinking-triplebyte https://triplebyte.com/blog/rethinking-triplebyte

dmitriid_y 4y ago

From experience, this is not dissimilar to the internship-to-hire programs large firms like Qualcomm have used. At anywhere even 10% of that company's size, any individual can easily feel lost in a tidal wave -- triply so if your firm is facing any significant mountain of work prohibiting a good onboarding. Some employers may think this is even advantageous for them, but it can burnout the new hires fast. The difference with this is the new cohort would have better cohesion from the get-go and might stand a greater chance of dealing with cultural fusion, imposter syndrome, "am I paid appropriately" syndrome, "why shouldn't I advocate a union" syndrome, etc

geraldwhen 4y ago
Quite the opposite. Cohesion likely means non-diverse. HR would prefer that each team member be as different as possible in terms of age, sex, race, etc. The less cohesive the team, the better my team looks to the HR gods that send me threatening meeting invites.

rgbrgb 4y ago

They might be a good team. A team of undergrads built Facebook. Agree it could be a hard sell internally but if they had a track record of building great apps, I could see hiring them to build another one. That said, if a team is that strong they should probably start their own company.

watwut 4y ago
> but if they had a track record of building great apps In that case, we should not primary refer to them as to "new-grads". The primary thing about them is that they already successfully build multiple apps. They should be referred to as "existing team".
onion2k 4y ago
They might be a good team. A team of undergrads built Facebook. On the other hand, they might be a terrible team. A team of undergrads built Facebook.

jokethrowaway 4y ago

There are new grads who are already at senior level and have been working for several years. They're definitely a minority but they exist and if this company can select groups of new grads that ship. I remember very well I was working with a team of great engineers when I was in uni and we all sadly split up to pursue different careers. That said, focusing on new grads sounds limiting, if I was BYOT I'd allow any groups of developers to participate. There is plenty of freelancers groups who may find it attractive to work together for a single client. The main reason I don't like working inside companies is that I'm subject to whatever BS management think will make us more productive. In hindsight, in my 15 years of professional experience, that never works. A group of motivated seniors contributors will always find a way to self organise which is more efficient than whatever rituals are imposed.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

gms7777 4y ago

Possibly retention? A group of friends coming into something together might stick around longer than a typical new grad. On the other hand, they might all bounce as a group if they're unhappy.

lkxijlewlf 4y ago
Nah, turnover would be higher. 6 Months in they're screaming at each other because they can't decide on spaces or tabs.

datavirtue 4y ago

The obvious hyper-brogrammer generator. Sounds like the opposite of what everyone wants.